This is really aimed at people still in the UK with kids of the appropriate age.

I have a son back in the UK. He's in his GCSE year and starting to think about A-levels. He seems to have a notion that is normal to do four. In my day it was three, unless you were very bright. Have things changed?

My day ( 80's ) we did three plus General Studies A Level.

From my understanding (limited and only from speaking to teenage relatives and neighbours), the norm these days is to start out studying 4 subjects, but to then drop your weakest one after AS level, so in essence you end up with 3.5 A levels (3 full A levels and 1 AS).

HTH.

All grist to the mill. Thanks to both of you.

But that was back when A levels were difficult I too did 3 A levels and I suspect Souvy is of a similar vintage.

1963 was a good year.

When I did my maths O-level, you couldn't use a calculator. For the A-level (maths/statistics) you could but you still had to show the working. It was the same for the first two years of my degree.

Did they even have O levels in 1963?

I seem to remember that we were allowed to use slide rules (though I'm damned if I could use one now). I also seem to remember that most of the marks were for the workings. You would fail if you just wrote down all the correct answers.

I took 3 A levels and 1 AS.

Not sure. I didn't sit them straight out of the womb. In fact, I didn't sit them until 1978, 1979, 1980 and 1982.

Slide rules? There's posh. I think we had log tables. I would not know what to do with one these days.

What you say reminds me of one infamous maths exam during my degree. It was a three-hour exam, based on one set of data that went through a series of analyses of increasing complexity involving lots of Greek letters. The end result was a single number, to two decimal places. There were only two possible marks on that test; 100% or 0%. You got no marks for the workings. Not many people got 100%.

Were you one of them?

Without putting too fine a point on it, WTF is the use in being able to do that?

I know, only 2 decimal places. I mean really!

I'll bet that answer was 3.14. That's a pretty famous maths number to 2 decimal places, I can't think of any others?

2.72, or 1.62?